Why Your Agile Scrum Framework is Flawed

If your scrum results in less-than-ideal outcomes, consider your agile scrum framework flawed. While scrum framework is perfect for situations when priorities can change quickly, your company may be struggling to find how best to implement and manage these changing priorities.

The main reason why your agile scrum framework is flawed is because of a company-wide failure to educate everyone involved in how the agile process should work. As a scrum master can tell you, nothing is more debilitating than to spend a long day planning a sprint, and have an executive stop you in the hallway at the end of the day to add something to the sprint.

Education is necessary across the company. Stakeholders, executives, and others must understand the methodology of agile scrum and why sticking to it is important. Changing your sprint plan after the fact is demoralizing and can affect your team’s productivity. The key is to stop stakeholders from swooping in at the last minute and changing priorities.

Here are 3 reasons how you’ll recognize flawed agile scrum framework and what you can do about it.

#1—You can’t determine the right sprint length

Sprint lengths can vary by organization. However, there are some rules of thumb to help you determine the right one for your situation. If you’re new to scrum, you want to avoid sprint lengths that are too short or too long. Too short, and you burden your team too heavily. Too long, and it’s hard to keep everyone focused and on track.

Some scrum experts say a two-week sprint length is ideal for most situations. In addition, others have found that three weeks give them time to develop features in the first two and use the last week for production preparation. Whatever length you decide to use, make sure it works with your product environment.

#2—Your stakeholders don’t understand how scrum works

You can’t expect stakeholders to work with implementing scrum if they don’t understand how it works. Communicating sprint calendars is a good first step. It also helps for stakeholders to realize how changing priorities in the sprint plan can negatively impact the sprint.

It’s also important that stakeholders understand how you prioritize requests in the product backlog. Stakeholders for the most part don’t realize that other higher priority features are still active in the backlog. Communicate to stakeholders how the product owner provides an impact analysis for the overall product. Also show how they can submit their requests for the next sprint plan. This will give the team more time to better understand what the request is about. It will also ensure that the feature has the value expected by the stakeholder.

#3—Stakeholders don’t trust your team to complete requests in a timely manner

If you’re getting a lot of emergency requests that continually pull you away from your sprint plan, it’s time to build trust with your stakeholders. You do this by setting realistic goals in your sprint planning session, sticking to them, and accomplishing those goals consistently.

When you communicate to stakeholders your sprint plan and then you work consistently to achieve everything on the list, your stakeholders will begin to have confidence that you’ll deal with their requests in a timely manner. It takes some work on the part of the sprint team, but can effectively stop most emergency requests.

Final thoughts

Your agile scrum framework needs to be communicated to stakeholders in your company, but once everyone is on the same page, the benefits are amazing. Scrum teams, stakeholders, and management need to form an understanding of the process and procedures and their place in helping to make it run smoothly.

Before your next sprint planning meeting, take a look at hutwork.com. You’ll find a truly innovative Roadmapping platform fully integrated with collaboration, management, tracking, and reporting measures. Hutwork lets you plan your next sprint easily and efficiently and then track its progress and report on its success.